Cliffton Peacock, studio art professor at the College of Charleston’s School of the Arts, was awarded a $25,000 Individual Support Grant from the prestigious Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc. Of 462 grant applications, Peacock was one of twelve recipients selected, based on the quality of work and dedication to painting, sculpting and/or printmaking.
Artist Adolph Gottlieb began his artistic career in New York City in the 1920s and became known as a prosperous Abstract Expressionist. Upon his death in 1974, he left instructions in his will that a foundation be created to benefit “mature, creative painters and sculptors.” His widow Esther, having helped to conceive the idea, saw to the fruition of the endeavor and bequeathed the major part of her estate to the Foundation when she died in 1988. Each year the Foundation selects a group of five artists and other art professionals, who are not affiliated with the Foundation, to serve as advisers to the Foundation and also select the grant recipients.
Cliffton Peacock received his M.F.A. degree from Boston University in 1977. His teachers there included James Weeks, John Wilson and Philip Guston. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts grants, three Massachusetts Artist Fellowship awards, an Englehard Foundation grant, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship, and Awards in the Visual Arts grants, sponsored by the Equitable Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome, a South Carolina Individual Artist Fellowship, and most recently, a 2001 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Peacock has exhibited his paintings nationally many times since 1980 and has had one-person exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, SC, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC.
His work is in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Hood Museum of Art, among others. He has been an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the College of Charleston since 1996.